Ultracrepidarian
a vocab word that’s detritus of an anti-intellectual world
Dunning-Kruger, too.
I always have valued my intellect and nerd-level knowledge even when it got me bullied. Back when I was a kid, even if I’d be punished for being smart by my peers, in that time, the cool kids still worked hard to get good grades, and intelligence was valued across the board. Just not nerd-dom. The social differences were subtle, but I imagine it had mostly to do with economic class. I think back on this almost wistfully: back when nerdy stuff might have been mocked but someone with general intelligence or expertise or knowledge gained by lots of good education was considered admirable.
Nowadays? King Dunning and Prime Minister Kruger rule the landscape. And experts are punished and abused like I was in my ‘80s classrooms.
Dunning-Kruger? I hardly know her.
What’s the Dunning-Kruger effect? Glad you asked. It’s a good term to know about in today’s climate. Basically, what it boils down to is this: The less a person knows about a subject, the more confident they are about their smarts. It’s an inverse effect, too: the more knowledge a person actually has, the more conscious they are of how much more they have to learn. Or, as the Bard so pithily wrote in As You Like It,
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.
Back when I would teach stage combat at the college level, there were two main types of young men* in my classes: the martial arts/fighter kid who’d try to explain to me why what I was doing wasn’t real; and the geeky, curious men who ended up taking more classes, following me into club, etc.
*the young women and enbies in those classes tended to have different mindsets and experiences surrounding violence, even ‘fake’ violence, so that’s why I’m bringing up the men only here. Non-men were much more hesitant, coming at the practice from an unfamiliar place. Is that a gender stereotype, that all men have a violent streak? Maybe, but it’s definitely been true in my lived experience. I talk a little more about this in my piece called ‘Vapulate.’
I’ve told you about the Band of Young Men before, in a couple places, including chapter 7 of my memoir, so go there to get more of that dynamic. There was a profound goal with that group that we had to be the best, no question. This was such a deep need that not only did we excel ourselves, but anyone who couldn’t keep up was summarily ejected from our presence. Not only that, but anyone who wasn’t a part of this high level (and high strung) group would meet with vicious mockery by us elites, not always behind their back. Part of this I think is more about what social dynamics were in the ‘90s as opposed to more recently – in the 20-teens and during the Plague, inclusion and acceptance became much more the norm. And now, how far we’ve backpedaled. Sigh…
But I bring up the BoYM because I’ve always remembered something about those training courses and this sentiment has stuck with me all these years. The best student in the class we took whilst in training to become the RenFaire swordbros would go on to become the second in command of that troupe. He’d always make it a point to partner up with me for all scenes and all weapons. He explained that in all stage combat courses, he’d make sure to choose the best actor in the class to partner with, not the best fighter or best athlete. I was always taken aback by this, not only that he insisted I was the best actor in each class we took, but that he was right: the acting is way more important in stage combat than knowing how to fight. In fact, as I would always try and let my fighty students know many years later as a teacher myself, the more you already know about fighting, the more behind you’ll be in the learning of theatrical combat. Someone who comes in with zero martial arts or fencing knowledge, in other words, has a big advantage over those who already ‘know how’ to fight.
This is a lesson that the lovely gentleman wrestler Crazy N8 knew already, the moment he enrolled in his first stage combat course with me: he joined not because he was already a skilled and knowledgeable WWE style wrestler, but specifically to learn new techniques of theatrical fighting, so that he could bring that new knowledge to his wrestlers and, quote: ‘so I can save them from fucking themselves up.’ The wise know when they don’t know, and know the value of what Keats called ‘negative capability.’
I was just in the middle of outlining today’s essay when I ran across this article from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s timely newsletter, and I was aghast that such a highly educated, intelligent, and accomplished superstar could ever feel unsure of himself. Then again, this is no doubt why he does such a good job communicating his thoughts on history and politics — he’s well able to question himself as he researches, and honors his own good education.
Sometimes when I look back at my younger self and my arrogance in being so sure I was right about things I knew very little about, I feel such shame. Obviously, being wrong is a part of growing up and evolving as a human. Yes, it’s easier and more convenient to be handed a book of beliefs when we’re young and to never question them. That saves a lot of time, energy, and self-doubt. However, not examining one’s beliefs is a part of stagnation and resignation.
The Mansplaining Stays Mainly on the Plain
Mansplaining certainly isn’t a new phenomenon: for as long as women have been assumed to be less than, there’ve been men to explain areas of their expertise to their face or to the public to take credit for the ideas themselves. As the internet has grown, suddenly the sources of information have multiplied exponentially – whereas in the past, you’d get your reports or your news or your science facts or criticism from a small number of vetted places. Once the internet became easy and widespread, now there’s no separating the work of someone with expertise, experience, or scholarship from anyone else pouring a few hundred words onto their blog or into their podcast (or their Substack. Ahem). And so now a thing is only true if a person has experienced it firsthand. They won’t trust an ‘expert’ – how do I know they’re not lying to me for money? Actually they’re all out to get me. …Can you see how easy it is for an isolated, undereducated person to fall so far down this rabbit hole of confusion that they come out the other side disbelieving the moon landing happened?
My own fallacy in following a specialized group of talent makes me understand how paranoid gatekeeping events like Gamergate can happen. I’ve been there, in that spot as a young person who knows a little but thinks I know everything, being celebrated for being one of a tight tribe and terrified to be ousted from same. Bullied, lonely men guarding their speical nerd spaces against those who don’t ‘deserve’ the knowledge makes sense to me, though obviously I don’t agree with such toxicity. I get it, though. I’ve been that asshole myself, and it’s only now in my middle age that I’ve come through and therefore past a lot of that petty exclusiveness (though I still get it from the other end by those still active in that one stage combat organization I left years ago). I remember when I found that a couple of my stage combat colleagues had been learning about the Victorian mixed martial art called bartitsu, and were collecting much expertise in the history and practice of the art. I stepped up in some social media comments, arrogantly mocking the ‘misspelling’ of it, because of course I knew it was *really* baritsu, as was written in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Bartitsu sounds stupid, I said, and we all know it’s actually a Japanese art.
You can see where this going, right? It is in fact called bartitsu, and was not a fully Japanese art but a hybrid of jujutsu, English boxing, and other European forms like single stick. It’s misspelled by Arthur Conan Doyle in his story as ‘baritsu’, not the other way around. It’s not a Japanese name, but named after its originator, Edward William Barton-Wright. My colleagues knew this, of course, because they were well up in their studies. I thought I knew everything about it, because I knew next to nothing about it.
The ‘do your own research’ fallacy is just that, but boy is it understandable how we got to this place. Because there is a seed of truth to it: healthy skepticism is in fact a good thing most of the time, as is questioning authority. The limited sources of our past have in many cases been exclusive in a bad way, such as not including non-white, non-male voices in the canons of expertise. Sometimes, experts do in fact get bought off: paid to spread falsehoods, or perpetrate lies for their own agenda (like racism). Just look up the history of MSG, for example, or the trend of having no-fat foods said to be healthy instead of no-sugar. But still. To equate Joe Blow’s Blowhard Blog opinions to a peer-reviewed academic journal article is a huge mistake.
The Ivory Tower of Babel
I mentioned this state of things as I began the glosses of my memoir, as I Mused about my own process and intellectual challenges through all that personal writing, centered on higher ed:
It’s funny, isn’t it, to watch the anti-intellectual, anti-expertise waves spread and crash over more and more of the wider culture. And to see how much the lack of critical thinking and close reading has spread toxins throughout all branches of society. Even in only the couple years since I finished Next Time, the animosity towards the well-educated and knowledgeable has exploded, as has the hot mess of the higher ed system as a whole. The Ivory Tower is looking a lot like the Tower card in tarot, innit. (And by ‘funny’ to watch, I mean morbidly compelling, like watching a train slowly derail itself while its caboose catches fire. While riding on it.)
Anyway. The ivory tower is crumbling; how long before it collapses? Something’s gotta give. And this has been true for several years now. You might worry about me having a job once the current administration dismantles higher ed, but I don’t have much of a job to begin with. I’m more worried about my stepkid entering college right now. Where will the whole thing be by the time he gets his masters?
I’m reading a book right now that I’d heard of multiple times before but never got to it till now. It’s called The Coddling of the American Mind and its main premise is about how an over-protective parenting system has rendered young adults both way too fragile and also super prone to closed minds of outrage and anger. That’s an oversimplication of course, and I’ll be talking more about this book I’m sure once I finish it, but I do see this quite a bit in my continued work in higher ed. There’s an aversion to work that’s kind of alarming: it’s the equation of anything vaguely uncomfortable to actual personal insult or even danger, that I cannot understand.
Of course there’s tons of other more qualified writings on the anti-intellectual trends of today, and I am not one to suffer from Dunning-Kruger myself, so I will direct you into more [DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH] works done by actual experts in things like sociology, political science, and history for more. As I’ve mentioned before in other unhinged essays of mine, I come to these topics from a humanities expertise, which is cool in that I do get a taste of all those things with the addition of the impact of arts onto all these cultural upheavals, which is indeed important. But other experts have more in-depth thoughts from other (arguably more direct) directions, so. Where to begin? Probably Hofstader, and then Asimov. And then get depressed about how long ago this problem was worrying some of our smarter people, and look around you, and… ugh. Come here. Let me buy you a drink.
This is a really fascinating video essay about the popular mockumentary maven, Philomena Crunk, and the rise (yet again) of anti-intellectualism, and how this character feeds into this idea of: educated = elitist. This might actually be a good springboard onto this topic, if it interests you.
What’s my conclusion to all this ranting? Anti-intellectualism is dangerous, and I fear it’s too late.
~Now that I’ve finished (?) this interesting wandering, I find a handful at least of topics that I now want to spend an entire essay on, each. Shall I?